


To Sleep, Perchance

by stele3



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 12:17:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4835033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3





	To Sleep, Perchance

The flight from Japan to New York lasts twelve and despite the many amenities and comfortable seating on Stark’s plane Steve can’t convince himself to sleep at all. Ever since the _Valkyrie_ , he can’t quite shut off when he’s in the air.

By the time he’s back on the ground, he’s been awake for forty-five hours. Half of that time had been spent fighting some kind of gelatinous…things. He can’t make words even in his own head. There’s a car waiting for him, but if Steve goes to sleep now he doesn’t think he’ll wake up. It’s just a half-hour drive to his house. He can make it. Sitting upright, he digs his fingernails into the inside of the opposite wrist and tries to ignore the flickering in the corners of his vision.

Between his front door and his bed there are thirty steps. Each one feels heavier than the next; Steve shucks his clothes as he goes, too tired to think about the mess or the open windows or anything but getting to the bed– _his_ bed, with his pillows and his own skin-smell.

He has just enough consciousness left to check the kitchen–used plates piled in the sink, fruit missing from the bowl on the counter–and the door to the apartment’s second bedroom–closed with a little light showing under the crack.

It’s possible that checking these two things was what kept him awake all the way from Osaka. It’s been almost two years since Bucky came back…no. Since the person Bucky is now came to live with him. Usually Steve can make the distinction, but right now he just can’t. He sees the plates and the light under the door, and he is glad.

He doesn’t even manage to turn down the sheets, just collapses onto the bed, curls up on his side still half-wearing his uniform, and goes to sleep.

When he peels his eyes open again the light in the room has changed and someone is on the bed behind him. _Bucky_. Steve doesn’t even need to see him: he knows Bucky’s smell, the indescribable rightness of it. He smiles blurrily at his clock as words swim up through the fog in his head… _I would know him blind_.

The mattress shifts and he rolls back, still smiling, and reaches up catch Bucky’s jaw, pull him down into a kiss.

Bucky goes totally, absolutely still. The kind of stillness that wakes Steve up, brings him sharply out of the bed in his mind–long lost to everything except his own aching, bittersweet memory–to this one, the one where he is lying on his back with his heart beating hard enough to crack open while Bucky stares down at him. The same bed that Bucky has occasionally joined him in over the past two years, never touching, never sleeping, always perched on the edge and silently watching Steve sleep. He does that a lot of other places, too: he spent three whole months watching Steve from a distance before choosing to come in closer, something Steve only found out about afterwards, and in two years he has never stopped watching, wary as a wounded stray.

In two years Steve had thought he’d had enough time to stop wanting, to let the man he remembers stay in an empty grave and a ravine in Europe.

Apparently he’d been wrong.


End file.
